Chapter XXII
XXII
and though Bagger and Arno lost their bags in the trench collapse, the kid managed to swipe two haversacks along the march, and Bagger salivates upon finding inside the first one a rations tin of corned beef, potatoes, and biscuit, which he gives to Arno as he can’t bear to see the kid paw through the second sack, the one crunchy with dried blood, which ends up holding a largely unspilled cup of corn willy, smells all right to Bagger, so he gets finger-spooning,
and though the Butcher Birds were taught to eat separately after Jerry vaporized ten supping soldiers with a single shell, the battle din is as soft as it’s ever been, so it feels safe enough, the most hostile force is Popkin glaring at Veck while gnashing a butter pat, though Veck’s oblivious, he’s trying to amuse the angel by pretending to chew his chocolate bar through the horse’s mouth before sneaking it up the neck,
and with cheeks full of a dead man’s dinner, Arno asks Bagger to read to him, and Bagger checks Veck, skeptical the man speaks anything but horse, but Veck takes The Son of Tarzan from his pack and tosses it to Bagger’s lap, which draws a sapped smile from Arno, the kid knows the drill, he shovels himself a funk hole beneath the field gun and tucks in, a sight that makes Bagger oddly weepy, how adapted to dirt all of them have become,
and once Bagger opens the book, he realizes it’s too dark to read it, and glances at Veck, who returns a long, steady, in fact horselike stare through the nag’s fist-sized eyeholes, a silent reminder a horse can kick your fucking head off if it wants to, so Bagger nods his appreciation and Veck guardedly hands over the angel, her half-lidded eyes as calm as milk, smiling drowsily at Bagger before he lowers her beside Arno, who instinctively curls into her side,
and Bagger tents her hood so her brightness is enough to light the book’s pages, whereupon he finds the lattermost folded corner, clears his throat of corn willy, and commences chapter 19, “ ‘Behind them Korak emerged from the jungle and recovered his spear from Numa’s side,’ ” and Popkin takes a rip of bacon and snipes, “Keep it down, shit-hole, or I’ll eat you next,” the lummox didn’t appreciate Arno getting the angel without a vote,
and Bagger stops reading only when he notices Arno’s eyes are closed, but it turns out the kid’s not quite asleep, he sighs and nuzzles into the angel and asks, with a disturbing calm, “We gonna die out here, Bagger?” to which Bagger forms a weary, mud-caked grin and replies, “Maybe we already did,” delivered as devil-may-care gag but feeling more like a lonely arctic wind,
and it’s the book’s flimsy paper cover and coarse pulp pages that make Bagger’s palms itch for the soft luxury and aromatic assurance of his father’s red leather Bible, but when he moves to find it, he realizes he doesn’t have it, it’s in his haversack and his haversack is twenty miles back in the trench,
and Bagger’s chest seizes and his mind flashes back, two months after the Bishop’s body filled with seawater, the day Bagger itemized his dead dad’s apartment, how each of the leavings felt like a piece of the corpse that never got buried, china dishes as teeth, pewter silverware as bone, heirloom sheets as wrinkled skin, Bagger could have inherited all of it, enough physical weight to force him to stop hustling and settle down, but a burial was a burial, so he boxed everything for sale, kept nothing,
and why not, he already had the only enchanted item, the red leather Bible, except now he doesn’t, he fucking lost it, he wants to rocket to his feet and go careening back through the Argonne to find it, it will glow red through the trench clay and beat like the Bishop’s heart, but no, it’s gone, just like his father’s gone, leaving only the shamefly, which has more reason than ever to shame him,
and Bagger butts his skull against the bottom of the howitzer, like Frenchy Franchouillard, but on purpose, for he’s the dumbest fuck, no fucking good at anything that matters, all the naysayers were right, he’s never been responsible enough to be the keeper of anything good, and Bagger looks down at Arno and the angel, the greatest goods he’s ever needed to keep, and he knows, in the hole where his heart used to be, that he’ll fail in keeping them too,